среда, 27 ноября 2013 г.

A year ago
I was a happy newbie. Today I generate ideas how to popularize warhammer 40k in
Belarus :)

I made the
first step and organized the first national team tourney on 16 November 2013.
It was a good push forward for experienced players from one side and showed
that our community is still too small. I think that we have a broad
possibilities to grow up, so I focus now on involving new people with the
warhammer 40k in Belarus. Here is my plan:

вторник, 19 ноября 2013 г.

This was my
first try to organize a tourney and it is successful as I can see. Four teams
from different belorusian cities took part in the event. Minsk, Vitebsk,
Mogilev and Polotsk participated in the full circle game system. It stands for
3 games if we have 4 teams, actuaaly.

I round
result:

Minsk – Vitebsk
: 42 -58

Polotsk -
Mogilev : 64 – 36

II round:

Mogilev – Vitebsk
: 44 – 56

Minsk – Polotsk
: 44 - 56

III round:

Vitebsk – Polotsk:
56 – 44

Minsk – Mogilev
: 54 - 46

So, team
from Vitebsk won with all three victories under the belt. Team Polotsk finished
second, Minsk placed third, while Mogilev right after the Minsk:)

Yes, this 10 cm Dice (the prize for the first place) is made of steel and weights about 10 kilograms:)

среда, 13 ноября 2013 г.

The reason,
why i abstained from posting here is that I try to organize some tourneys :)

For those
who are not in course of situation with warhammer 40000 in Belarus I’ll make a
short report.

I suppose
that we have about 50 players in Belarus and only about 30 active players. The
average size of a local tourney is about 16 people.

Nevertheless
we manage to participate in every team tourney in Moscow and in every European
Team Championship past 4 years.

This year
we managed to get 3 teams to the Russian Team Cup – that is a great step
forward for our tiny community!

Now I want
to make another big step and set up a national team tourney! I called it
“Belorussian Team Cube - 2013” It will happen on the 16 of November in Minsk. 4
teams from 4 different Belarusian cities will take part in a tourney,
representing Minsk, Vitebsk, Mogilev and Polotsk.

Each team
consist of 5 players. The format of a tourney is a 1850 pts with ETC scoring
system.

пятница, 13 сентября 2013 г.

In the
previous article I discovered the situation, where you want to risk against
more powerful, usually, opponent. But there can be different situation – when you
have advantage in composition and don’t want to be outplayed in the game of
pairing. So, this article is about “how to minimize risks versus less powerful
teams”.

I showed
that opponent can guess our champion to maximize points. So, it’s the worst
case for our team, actually and let’s count that opponent successfully did it –
he knows our champion! How to hold the ground if such a shit has happened?

четверг, 12 сентября 2013 г.

The game of
pairings without champion’s game is a game with full information and can be
calculated throughout. But when we have a champion’s game everything becomes
much-much different. We have to take into account the unpredictable factor –
enemy champion.

How can we
choose our own champion?

1 –
Defender as a champion. Most popular strategy is to play an allcomers army as a
champion. So, we just stabilize the champion’s game and can focus on the game
of pairings. The minus of this method – our powerful army is away and plays
with some opponent’s army that can be not the best choice for the team and can
decrease the outcome.

2 – Army without
good matchups as a champion. If we have an army that we are not possible to use
effectively – we can drop it from hand into a champion’s game. Possibly, it
will be the best possibility to find average pairing for that army. It can be
an attacker that has no targets or defender with 1 very-very bad matchup.

3 – The weakest
army as a champion. Just to drop the weakest army from hand before the game of
pairings main part.

4 –
Counter-champion. We can try to predict enemy champion and set the best army to
counter enemy champion. It’s the method to maximize the result, but if you fail
to predict the campion – you can loose by much.

To clear
out what is minimax strategy I’ll make an example with a 3x3 player game. We’ll
have 3*3*2*2 = 36 pairing variants in this game, but not all of them are
acceptable for us or our opponents! Let’s take a look at the evaluations table:

среда, 11 сентября 2013 г.

When I just
started to play team tourney I heard that “champions in a team tourneys make it
unable to calculate the whole pairings process throughout”. But how? I decided
to investigate that with a minimax strategy taken from the game theory of the
mathematical statistics. Let’s look at the pairings evaluations table, like I
posted in the previous aticle (values range from 0 to 20 according to the
expectations of points taken from the game):

Enemy team

GK

CSM

Eld

Tyr

BA

DE

Our team

Eld

5

13

10

15

11

6

IG

13

13

16

2

4

16

Dae

15

5

3

2

14

3

GK

9

14

13

14

8

13

SM

6

5

6

9

16

4

SW

6

14

17

16

10

14

I did this
example in 5th edition, so don’t try to think on the values itself:)

If you want
you can count that the average of this table is 10. So. It must be the game
with equal composition strength.

Now let us
consider the game of pairings without champion game! If both team’s evaluation
tables are the same, then one can calculate all 518400 combinations of pairins
for this table. On each step each captain chooses the best variant for his
team. I did this calculations for the table and the results are:

воскресенье, 8 сентября 2013 г.

Composition is, actually the list of armies in a team or the army lists included in your team.
For simplisity lets assume that all the players are of equal strength and there are no luck or unluck in the games and the outcome of each game depends only on army lists. I mean that Tyranids with 18 raveners looses to venomspam DE, DE looses to mech IG while mech IG looses to Tyranids:)
I'll cover the game for 6 persons in a team again.

How to build a perfect team?

1. Toolboxes. We can take the most powerful army lists possible, according to the results of the singles tournaments - they are called toolbox lists or allcomers. It's easy - just look at the top-10 of the Grand Tournaments around the world and choose the best armies. For example: Tau+SM, Eldar+Tau, CSM+Necrons, Necrons, Tyranids, Daemons+CSM. Looks solid and every list is designed to play with any kind of the opponent army.

понедельник, 2 сентября 2013 г.

I was asked
to do some translations on the topic on team tourneys. I'll start with covering
the rules for the team tourneys for 6 players in a team.

The team
consist of 6 players, one player is a team Captain. Every player in a team should
run an army from a unique codex (at least its primary detachment).

Every
player play with his army and only his army at the tourney, no rotating usually
possible. Each round a team plays with a different team simultaneously at 6
tables. The opponent team is chosen by the tourney organizers (TO). After
opponent team is defined – team captains have to do the pairings (I’ll call it “the
game of pairings”).

The game of
pairings routine:

First each
captain secretly write down the name (or army) of one of his players. Then
captains roll off to see who should start the game of pairings first. The
captain who lost the roll off chooses one of his players as the first defender
(he cannot choose champion, though). Then the captain who won the roll off choose
one player from his team to play with the first defender. So, the first pair is
defined. Then the first defender chooses the table on which to play (he can
choose any table from 6 available).

Then the
captain who won the roll off chooses the second defender and the opposite
captain chooses the player to attack that defender. Second defender chooses the
second table and so on, until all 5 players find their pairs and chose tables.

After all
five pairs are done, captains reveal the champions, who play at the last
(unchosen) table.

пятница, 30 августа 2013 г.

Our
composition on the past ETC-2013 looked like this: 3 defenders, 2
semi-defenders, 3 attackers. I tried to get the best possible pairings for our
attackers while playing defenders and semi-defenders as champions, defenders
and as last man standers. Let’s look at our composition in detail:

Defenders:

DA+IG – the
“first defender” based on the Azrael-boosted platoon with punishers and
Vendettas, the list that never get more than 12 points, but do not give points
to the opponent.

GK –
razorback spam, a lot of fast cheap troops. It has no destruction points, so it
can bring points in any match and also has the capability to attack several
builds that are afraid of mass S8 shooting.

IG+GK – the
second mech-defender with punishers. It synergies well with GK and DA, creating
something like a similar defender type.

So, all our
defenders need the same types of attacking build to be constructed for them.
Something like a target overload for opponent’s composition, that might not
include 3 attackers on mech armies.

пятница, 23 августа 2013 г.

The last
(5th) game from the Russian Team Cup – 2013 was against a team filled with ETC
Team Russia players. We decided to try to outplay them on pairings and put
tyranids, me, into first defend. Russia attacked me with Orks, so I played with
Aaz13 and his Meganobz!

I’ve posted
1 report already from Russian Team Cup – 2013. As I have no photos from the
games, It will be easier to post a short reports with some conclusions – it will
be better to read and understand.

пятница, 16 августа 2013 г.

At the end of day 2 we had only 3 points from 4 games. It's below average, so I was frustraited. What have I done wrong? Why we did so bad? I felt guilty and almost ruined in the evening...

I awakened with abolutely different mood. I decided to givemyopponents a good fight. Wonder that I found my team in the same mood - nobody was relaxed. Everyone were sober and ready to do the best! And the next team is again not the weakest team of the tourney - Scotland. They've lost to Russia and lost to Ukraine. So, we can do that!

Our pairings evaluation table was quite optimistic (as usual) but I looked at it carefully at each match up to match the evaluations with my own feelings about that or another match up.

After 1
great victory and 1 major loss and a
draw we had 3 points and met with team Finland – surprisingly not an easy
opponent at this point level!

Our mech
defenders look quite solid against Finland, so I decided to play this pairings
game with no risk at all. I sent Tau into champion game to get some points, because
all available champions have to give points to Tau. Here are our table of evaluations:

It look like a magic, but before the tourney I
met a guy from Belgium in vassal and we played an interesting game, then chat a
bit in skype, etc. It’s wonder that that guy's name was Tim. So, that’s the same
person, actually:) To be honest, I relaxed, and our game was full of jokes and
fun.

Army idea: It's an army designed to open up transport parkings of Imperial guard and Grey Knights. It's not a problem if opponent has Fortifications but the army is afraid of many manticores and GK dreadnaughts. Raveners and Tyrants get into close combat turn 2, so they synergies well. Two tervigons give 2 FnPs as well as let me stabilize the point outcome if the attack of the raveners fails.

My first game at ETC is against Vít "Hamster" Iľkanin with a mech IG army.

вторник, 13 августа 2013 г.

This was my first ETC and my first tourney outside of Russia-Belarus and I was a captain, ha-ha! Why? The main reason for this was to get fresh blood to the ETC! To change veterans for guys with hunger for victory. So, our team consisted of:

Yarek - our "heavy veteran", who participated 3 times in ETC before (4 times for now on). He did almost all the captains work actually and was our first defender with a solid DA/IG list.

Fredya - belarusian newbie who plays like a devil. Smart, active and agressive! Our forward with a Tau/SM list.

F9SSS - another newbie with an analitical mind. Calm and coolheaded, he is the man who takes the most heavy matches on his back and draws a tie with a mech GK list.

Warpstone - russian guy who tend to be one of the best russian players. He plays Necrons.

Aeris - russian veteran who joined after team after a drop of another defender. He took a mech IG/GK army to fit into composition.

Skaz - one of the best russian players from St. Pietersburg. He played a popular CSM/Necrons army.

Arsanar - one of our players dropped 2 days before the tourney, so we found a great player from russia who played on ESC and not ETC. He joined our team for the DE army.

Erle - it's me, the captain of the team with Tyranids army!

On the photo from left to right: F9SSS, Aeris, Skaz, Yarek, Fredya, Erle

Hey, I’m back to life! ETC 2013 has ended so I have some spare time to write my blog.

Yes, it meens that I’ve participated in the Warhammer 40000 European Team Championship in Novi Sad, Serbia this year! And that’s the reason why I haven’t write my blog for some time – I was focused on the tourney. So, now I have a lot of battlereports and articles to write for you.

вторник, 2 июля 2013 г.

I don’t
actually understand how, but I became a captain of a 5-man team Minsk & Co
for the team championship “Russian Federation Team CUP – 2013”. Our country,
Belarus, was represented by 3 teams at the tourney:

Expendables
– team composed entirely of our heavy veterans

Vitebsk
united – team from Vitebsk, guided by Bubon. A young but ambitious team.

Minsk &
Co – my team is a composition of talented newbies, guided by Jarek – one of the
most experienced 40k players in our country. I played the role of pairing
master and Jarek is our leader and adviser. Our composition is as follows:

Erle –
Tyranids (wide attacker)

Jarek – DA+IG
(tough platoon-defender)

F9SSS – GK (semi-defender)

Fredya –
Tau+SM (mech attacker)

Paul –
Necrons+GK (semi-defender)

So, I’m
gonna tell you about my own games first of all. Let’s look at my army list.

понедельник, 20 мая 2013 г.

I haven’t
beeng writing to a blog for a long time. Nevertheless, I think that it’s never
late to write another battlereport!

I found out recently that my friend Paul lives
150 meters from me and he has a nice table for 40k.

But the
first time I got to his place I forgot to buy batteries for my camera, so no
battlereport from that game. Just a few words – I faced Daemon and his
Tau/Eldar list with Ethereal powered firewarriors, Shadowsun powered
battlesuits and new awesome Skyray gunships:) I managed to pull a narrow draw
9-11 in favor of Tau, nevertheless it was an uphill battle for me.

The second
time I came to Paul’s place and faced Paul’s Tau/Eldar list (by memory):

пятница, 15 февраля 2013 г.

I got 27
points after 2 games and placed 5-th at the moment. Tourney table looked like
this:

1 Fredya
(Tau/Eldar)

2 Daemon,
my 1st round opponent (Eldar/Tau)

3 Golio
(Eldar)

4
[Proxybot] DarkTear (SM)

5 Erle
(Tyranids)

6 Johnny
(CSM)

Last game
Mission is Purge The Alien on Hammer and Anvil!

“Oh, cool”
– I said when I saw this table. CSM with double Helldrakes is an easy match for
my nids! Golio has nothing to do agains a dual LR list in a KP game. Fredya and
Daemon have similar lists, so they may end somewhere in a draw then I will win
the tourney!

No so fast,
silly tyranid, not so good… Proxybot goes to play with the bottom of the
tourney table and I face Golio and his Eldars (Emmm… Golio won the previous
tourney as far as I remember!)

вторник, 12 февраля 2013 г.

I got 9
points in the first game and found myself below the middle of the tourney
table. As a gift for my hungry hive-fleet was second pairing – Hitter with
Daemons of Chaos with 5-th edition like army list:

Обо мне

I started to collect tyranids in the middle of 2009. I played my first game in April 2010 and cannot stop playing:) I prefer tourneys over friendly games, so in my blog I try to investigate the phenomena of competetive tyranids through battle reports, articles and other staff. Feel free to write me on e-mail «Erdagan@tut.by»